Historically, development and testing environments have been built and managed at the project level, and often remain underfunded, under-resourced and underutilized for significant periods of time. The development and testing demand and the IT infrastructure management processes differ in their DNA. Development and testing is unpredictable and has variable demand cycles while the IT managers look at smoother predictable operations, gradual capacity building and higher utilization. Despite being a crucial IT function, the inability to quickly provide the capacity needed by development and testing teams delays the application development life cycle and hampers the delivery of an application quickly and efficiently.
As the pace of change and the level of competition is growing, businesses today need agile IT environment to match the highly dynamic and resource intensive needs of the application development and testing – a business critical function.
According to Gartner, cloud and mobility will drive the worldwide application development market to exceed USD 10 billion in 2013. By leveraging cloud, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop and perform extensive scenario testing in shorter cycles. Here’s how:
Cloud provides developers and test engineers with a self-service model for requesting and almost instantly receiving resources from within a pool of secured, shared and scalable infrastructure resources. This capability can shave days or even weeks off of application development project times, speeding time to market. Cloud also enables these teams to build configuration templates and machine snapshots in seconds, run them in parallel, and customize them to meet the needs.
Test engineers can quickly deploy configurations and scale performance on-demand heavy load testing, saving time and operational costs over traditional on-premise development and testing environments.
Benefits of moving development and testing to the cloud include:
• Achieve faster time-to-market and greater flexibility for new products and services.
• Automate approval workflows and reduce the cost of IT infrastructure management.
• Enhance ID & Access control and safeguard data with a private or a hybrid solution.
• Utilize infrastructure capacity efficiently with granular monitoring and management of infrastructure resources.
Considerations for cloud-based development and testing
While development and testing in a cloud-based model addresses the traditional roadblocks of cost, scalability, and lack of process and methodology, it has its own challenges:
Security & Control – Businesses may have applications that need to comply with regulatory and corporate restrictions around security and data privacy for e.g. access control for offshore and sub-contractors or an applicable local law that mandates compliance to data residency and hence restricts usage of a public cloud for data/devices. These may not even move to an off-premise cloud instance for development and testing because of proprietary/legacy systems, as well as intellectual property security considerations. In addition, control & governance mechanism needs to be set for integrating workflows, identity management, usage metering, chargeback, etc. to ensure efficiency and quality.
Interoperability – Businesses may be confronted with issues surrounding legacy systems development & testing on the cloud as connecting to legacy systems from the external cloud may pose interoperability issues. The ability to integrate with existing systems and share data between different platforms may need multi-tier technology architecture.
Performance – As development and testing environment on cloud maybe shared by numerous users, there may be cases where businesses may have to wait for the required bandwidth. Uptime is an important consideration when developing and testing on the cloud to assess the performance characteristics of an application. The IT admins have to ensure that underlying hardware provides adequate performance levels across storage, network and compute in a private cloud, while such tweaking may not be available in a public cloud.
Monitoring – Monitoring of application, which is in a distributed format, one spanning multiple servers, on multi-cloud environment or accessing multiple applications through web services, becomes difficult from a performance, security and availability perspective. A full-featured logging and tracing mechanism for troubleshooting becomes imperative. Measuring the cloud utilization by various teams and business units enables better capacity planning for future.
Management – Servicing and managing development and testing environment has been challenging because of the bursty workloads and the dynamic service requests. The current processes are designed around current IT service delivery models. The processes such as provisioning, procurement, configuration and de-provisioning of the resources are manpower intensive at the transactional levels and automation is limited by the technology. While cloud provides a wide variety of build/integration systems, test harnesses, and development and testing tools, there is still a need to bring all of this together in a turnkey and managed model to reduce the burden of managing development and testing infrastructure on cloud.
Developing for the cloud
– Developing applications to run on cloud is different from developing applications for a traditional or virtualized IT environment. Developers must build applications that consider resource unavailability and is able to recover from such incidences. For e.g. a multi-tier application should be loosely coupled and ready for any other tier failure. The application should be built in a way that allows multiple instances of a component to run concurrently so that in case an instance fails, the components could easily switch to another instance.
Critical Success Factors
A thorough planning and selecting the right technology and cloud service provider must be done in order to maximize the value of the cloud-based development and testing environment.
To understand cloud-ready environments, some key architectural requirements of a cloud-based development and testing environment must be known:
+ What hardware/compute resources will be used and will it be capable of achieving development and testing objective?
+ What resources (wiring and cabling, SAN and storage, rack space etc.) will be needed before any servers or workloads are installed?
+ What networking and data storage capabilities in terms of capacity will be required?
+ What workloads/applications will be placed in the cloud?
Businesses must make sure that the cloud-based development and testing environment is aptly architected for hybrid environment and does not lead to application performance degradation.
Once the development and testing environment in the cloud is established, businesses must take into consideration the following to ensure an agile development and testing life cycle:
+ Template library of ready-to-use VMs, defining server, capacity & storage requirements along with application components, must be created. Such templates allow team members to quickly duplicate environments and streamline provisioning.
+ Services in the cloud should be integrated with the right chargeback/metering processes and tools. This will enable enterprises with the financial thresholds and control of costs in the development and testing cloud.
A comprehensive cloud solution for development and testing provides increased control over projects, speed of deployment, ease of collaboration, and the ability to access environments on demand, enabling efficient and quality application development and testing.
Source: http://www.informationweek.in/cloud_computing/13-02-08/maximizing_the_value_of_cloud-based_development_and_testing_environment.aspx
